Somehow I'm not too surprised, I saw the wrinkly fingerprint problem from the pool coming a mile away... I'm really surprised they didn't just give people badges with a magstripe, barcode, or RFID so they could scan themselves in. I'm as much a sucker for cool new technology as anyone, but fingerprint reading isn't really the right choice for the job :(

JudasHerbq:

First?

Shut the hell up. No one cares. Or at least register your username so you can write your damn "first" post and then modify it shortly afterwards with something worth reading.

The nuclear plant where I used to work, discovered this drawback with biometrics in very much the same way. The employees got tired of the system rejecting their fingerprints, so they relaxed the system a bit... and it started letting anyone in that still had a pulse, or a finger. Took them the better part of a day to figure it out, then had to lock down and sort things out. They were back to the badge entry system the next day.

When I took a computer security course in college, one of the assignments was to do an in-depth investigation & report on any security topic that interested the student (with teacher approval to prevent overlapping). About 4 students chose topics related to biometrics. After presenting the report to the class, the other students were supposed to cross examine the content. Each of biometric reporters concluded that their particular topic would be a good mechanism for security. And each of them changed their minds within about three questions from the class. Each giving that ever-so-satisfying "Oh dear, i hadn't thought of that" expression. It was fun.

Retinal scan. Not affected by swimming. Unless... redeye from opening them underwater?

As someone said, don't give them ideas. It is obvious enough that they are too easily swayed by "ooh, new and shiny!"

Seriously, "cutting edge technology" isn't meant for every task. Just like programming languages, some tools have a specific purpose and shouldn't be forcefully adopted into another task just because the lingo sounds good.

Business schools need a "Don't be stupid" class to teach these guys/gals that not every new technology you read about is a necessity.

I've been a member of gym for over a year and they've had those scanners since I've signed up, and I never once had problems with the fingerprint scanner. Of course, this system only checks people coming into the gym.

Exactly. I work in information security and somehow, as soon as you mention biometrics, everyone shuts their brains off. Ooh, this will solve all our problems because... actually, they never get as far as the because -- the brain is already off at that point.

it's not a good idea to store passwords in plaintext, it's not a good idea to store raw fingerprint data

Just so we're clear, a fingerprint (retina scan, ...) is not a password. It is an ID, like your username. Others can find out what it is, and you can't change it every 60 days.

I used to work for a company that built biometrics systems, particularly fingerprint ones. The quality of such a product can vary wildly from vendor to vendor, and also you always have to see if it's the best fit for your situation. As someone else pointed out, it's not a panacea, though there are many situations in which it makes perfect sense and works like a charm.

Usually (especially in these kind of civil-use systems), the print is read upon enrollment, then minutiae are extracted, and some sort of minutiae matrix is stored in the db (from which you couldn't figure out the original print). that is what is matched when you press your index on the reader. It works quite well, at least at the company where I used to work. We had several such devices for opening some doors, and never had any serious problem.

Also, the bit about 7 points is kind of interesting. 7 minutiae is the minumum in most countries that you need to match to prove identity in court. In other countries, it's 12 (this applies for example when CSI-style cops get a fingerprint trace from a crime scene, then match it visually against the candidate list provided by the system or against a list of suspects. Fingerprint traces lifted from a crime scene are VERY rarely perfect or whole.. usually you just get a partial trace, of which you can figure out a few minutiae. If you manage to get 12, and they match against some print in your registry for which you know the identity, you've got your suspect.)

lowering that to less than 7 -can- work for civilian purposes like these, where the risk of false positives isn't so big, and wouldn't cause too serious (as in, say, accused of murder) problems. However, It might have been simpler to just put a towel next to the reader for people to dry their hands before using the reader or something like that. Sometimes there are simple solutions, like if you have very dry fingers, you just breathe on them a bit to get them moist, and more often thatn not, that's enough to get a perfectly good read (depending on the type of sensor used. works well with optic ones).

In and of itself, it's not a terrible idea. The problem (or WTF) is they expected it to work perfectly on first implementation. I don't know of anything that works that way.

Like anything in technology, you create a baseline based on theor (as in the example), then you find the applied problems and find solutions to those problems. At the end of the day (week/month) you analyze the problems and apply solutions, then start all over. After a few cycles of this, decide if it's benefits outweigh whatever problems are left. If so, grats, you've increase the efficiency of your business which eventually will equate to more money.

Some years ago I worked for Canadian Tire (think Wal-Mart with a bias towards auto parts). Their way of clocking employees in and out was to have you put your palm on a scanner and input your employee ID. My first day on the job, as luck would have it, I injured myself and had a band-aid on my finger by the time they registered my print.

You guessed it, after a few days when the band-aid came off, my handprint profile was different, and I was no longer able to clock in or out until they re-scanned my hand.

Personally, I would stick with better cards. In my gym, we have some kind of card with a bar code. We scan it and enter. It works but I'd prefer some rechargeable cards that can be scanned with proximity. That would be 100 times better.

That must have been a pretty shitty system. Most fingerprint systems use two or more fingers for redundancy (if you injure one, you can use another), and aren't affected by cuts or other scars on fingers (they can easly distinguish a scar from real minutiae). Normally both indexes are used, sometimes also the thumbs or middle fingers. and if you get both your hands completely badaged, the easier solution is to just bother the security guy to open the door for you for a few weeks until you recover.

So the person in front of you is coming down with the Flu of Death. They wipe their nose with their fingers and then put a snotty finger on the scanner. You come along, scan your finger, wipe your nose, and die a week later.

Retinal scan. Not affected by swimming. Unless... redeye from opening them underwater?

Retinal scans use unique details on a person's retina to identify them. Not to be confused with iris recognition, which may be susceptible to redeye variations depending on the accuracy of the scanner. The retina is on the back of your eye and is completely unaffected by redeye.

That must have been a pretty shitty system. Most fingerprint systems use two or more fingers for redundancy (if you injure one, you can use another), and aren't affected by cuts or other scars on fingers (they can easly distinguish a scar from real minutiae).

A colleague of mine used fingerprint scans in order to study if a population registry based on fingerprints would be feasible with nomads living in rural Africa.

He scanned both ring fingers as they are the least likely to be injured or abrased by the daily work. This explains why fingerprints one index finger is possibly a bad idea...

Oh, yeah. With the state of consumer biometrics, I'd be only too happy to let some device shoot a laser beam or some other light into my eye... Now, wouldn't we all have tons of laughs if that somehow malfunctioned?